A Flurry of Thoughts

As you may or may not know from my last post, there's now a rather large ball pit in my room. As you may or may not also know from my roommate's last post, Anne is currently on LOA (leave of absence) in Brazil. Allow me to summarize the implications of these two facts:

Anne got to spend less than a month with the ball pit before she left :(

I now live in a double all by myself

I now have a ball pit all to myself

Life works in mysterious ways, friends.

In other news, this is my first year having a car on campus. In fact, it's my first year having a car at all. While I may be used to all this snow, having grown up in Massachusetts, I can't say that I was truly prepared for what it would mean for me as a car owner. Digging out my car every time there is a significant snowfall is proving to be huge pain in the neck. Did I mention my roommate was in Brazil? Where, according to the weather app on my phone, is it now 72°F? And the high today was 82°F? Don't get me wrong, I love living here... it can just stop snowing now. Please. The bottoms of my pants literally froze today.

I'd also like to take this opportunity to tell you all about the coolest project I've worked on at Olin thus far. I present to you, Wizard's Chess!

The Knights of the Electromagnetic Table: Raagini, Toni, me, Michael, and Tatiana

Heavily inspired by the game from the Harry Potter universe, it's a voice-controlled chess board with "enchanted" pieces that enforces the rules of chess and gives users verbal feedback. How does it work, you ask? Magic, clearly. But if you aren't convinced, you can check out the project in more detail on my team's website. And, if you want to see it in action, we've been invited to demo it at the Wellesley STEM Expo on March 28th! We'll be working on revamping it up until then, and perhaps beyond. This is by far my favorite example of how "work" at Olin can actually be a ton of fun, and I'm really proud of my team for what we accomplished.

-Haley '17

P.S. Congrats to all the Candidates! Can't wait to meet you soon!

P.P.S. Obligatory "Yay Patriots!" even though I actually cared way more about the Kitten Bowl than the Super Bowl...